


where the harum-scarum magic of small wild creatures meets the magic of Man

by sassaffrassa



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke, Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate History, Case Fic, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Genealogy, Spells & Enchantments
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25142731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassaffrassa/pseuds/sassaffrassa
Summary: I reached out my hand; England's rivers turned and flowed the other way.Newtonian magic has been the staple of English Magic sinceslightly afterit was founded, mostly because all other options at the time were considered undesirable. But it’s not the only method of magic, as evidenced by a dark king on a dark throne, from the other side of the rain, who’s just popped in for a visit.Peter deals with unexpected guests, and considers the mystery that isWhat the Fuck Happened to Thomas Nightingale.
Relationships: Peter Grant & Thomas Nightingale
Comments: 27
Kudos: 54





	1. Concerning the effects of magic on the mind and spirit

**Author's Note:**

> title from Thomas Lanchester, _Treatise concerning the Language of Birds_ , Chapter 6.
> 
> a note for readers: 
> 
> if you’re unfamiliar with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, you’ll probably be in Peter’s shoes
> 
> if you ARE familiar, you’ll be in Nightingale’s
> 
> either way, you gotta be familiar with Rivers of London or this will be _very confusing_

Jasmine Jones was a young white woman with long blonde hair, dark blue eyes, a delicate chin, and an air of dreary hopelessness that made me want to look away. She looked comfy enough, dressed in a loose set of linen overalls and a soft sweater, with her hair neatly brushed and a supportive partner cuddled in close. But her eyes were incredibly sad, and her voice was dead and monotone.

She was also, as far as I could tell, completely bonkers.

“… and so they took up the dinner plates, and set the table, so that one hundred and one guests could be seated all in a row. The guests sat, and they began the feast, but the farrier’s daughter was so very hungry that she could not watch one hundred and one guests eat in front of her and not partake. She crept up to the table, and reached out for a grape, thinking it would be innocuous, and perhaps that it would stave off her hunger. But before she could eat it, there was a voice in her ear that called itself the East Wind, and said that she should not eat the food.”

I was there as a representative of the Folly, more than the SAU. Nightingale had gotten a call that morning and sent me off to Kensington to aid in a _disturbance of the Queen’s peace_. The disturbance, apparently, was Jasmine telling a weird story. 

Jasmine continued, “But the East Wind was soon drowned out by the growl of her stomach, so the farrier’s daughter shooed the wind, and reached out again. This time the East Wind blew hard enough to roll the grapes away, and also the meat and the cheese and the bread, down the table. But the farrier’s daughter was so very hungry, that she chased after the grapes. By this time she was ravenous, and so as soon as she touched the grapes she ate them. And then she turned to stone, just as all the guests had turned to stone, and when Bolton the Beholder came to the hall four thousand years later, they were all still stone, and the grapes were all gone.”

She looked like she was winding down. 

“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do with that, but I wrote it down anyway. 

Jasmine Jones’ partner, who called themself Pan after the statue in Kensington Gardens, came up as Jasmine seemed to slump in on herself once she stopped talking. They rubbed gentle hands over her shoulders, and asked if she wanted to take a nap.

“I’ve been asleep for hours already,” she said, and turned to the window. “If I don’t wake up, I’ll be lost any moment.”

Pan walked me into the kitchen to talk privately, wringing their hands.

“She’s not always like that,” they told me. They had tufty red hair and pointed ears, and I really couldn’t tell if Pan or the Disney cartoon had come first. “Sometimes she’s fine, acts normal and everything, but as soon as I ask how she’s doing, she comes up with something like that. It’s been going on for months, and it was weird, but now she’s getting worse.”

“It’s not usual,” I said, trying my hand at a patented Nightingale understatement, “but what makes you think it’s a case for us?” I wanted to ask if they’d tried therapy, but that seemed rude. “Any sense of magic, or the uncanny that you’ve noticed around the place?”

Pan sighed, and glanced over their shoulder at where Jasmine was now looking out the front window, staring at the cars passing like she was seeing something else, a long way away. “Not always. Sometimes, there’s a sense, like, like shadows in the wrong places… But I don’t know. It’s definitely magic though, I can tell. This is what the Nightingale does, isn’t it? This is what he’s here for.”

“That’s exactly what the Folly is here for,” I said, trying to divert the focus from my boss, who is one fallable man, however magically adept he might be, and onto a team, which includes me. Not just the window dressing. I can do magic too. 

Pan left me in the kitchen for a moment to try and coax Jasmine upstairs for a lie down. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, trying to come up with a few more notes (so far they were mostly a lot of _?????_ for Nightingale), when I felt the first trace of _vestigia_ since I entered the house. 

A slow, creeping moss, burrowing into the time-worn cracks in stone, fed by the barest trickle of cold, incessant rain; the wind that shrieks with the crows, swirling and turning. 

“Was there anything else you needed from me? I think she’s going to sleep for the rest of the day,” Pan said, walking back in.

I startled, shifted too far back, and fell hard into the corner of the built-in marble countertop. It would prove to leave a nice solid stripe of bruise horizontally across my tailbone.

I asked them about the _vestigia_ after I’d recovered my dignity, and my head felt a little more attached to my shoulders. Pan made agreeing noises when I tried to describe it, but in a sort of confused kind of way. I guess that’s fair, since I couldn’t figure out how to describe the very specific type of moss it had been, green and fine and glowing vibrant against grey stone, so I just made _moss_ gestures with my hands to try and get my point across. 

Oh well. I had the indication I needed to consider this officially a Folly case, and now I could go and bounce ideas off Nightingale, while I bounced apples through the firing range.

* * *

When I told Nightingale about it he frowned, and shook his head.

“Is… I mean, there was magic there, I definitely felt _vestigium_ , but I don’t know how we’re supposed to help with a depressive episode?” I didn’t mean to make that a question, so I tried again. “Is there magic that can help with mental health?”

“Not that I know of,” Nightingale said decisively. “It was considered a matter of the spirit and the church for a good long while, and of course in my day, it was more of a -- a personal failing, shall we say.” His eyebrows went up when I scoffed despite myself. “Indeed. So, I can’t say it’s ever been studied as a thing that magic might aid, especially not among Newtonian practitioners. The most experimental and scientific of those were more focused on the practical effects of the forms and wisdoms upon the physical world.”

I looked down at my notes and crossed off _Cheering Charm??? Check if thing_. “We’ve seen magic that can control the mind, the glamour and sequestration, and the like.”

“Quite,” said Nightingale, “however, those have short term effects. Much as any disease, a cure for mental illness must address the root cause. _Seducere_ can certainly suppress an individuals emotional state or inconvenient neuroses for the moment, but it cannot provide long term support, nor assist in healing.”

I was surprised he knew this much about the intricacies of mental illness, for a man who could Stiff Upper Lip for England as an Olympic sport, but then again, he’d seen some shit. He knew about trauma as both a copper and a soldier, and he’d mentioned watching fellow Folly members succumb to drink and despair. And Dr Walid was on his back constantly poking and prodding so he’d probably hooked him up with someone at some point. 

“Focus, Peter,” said Nightingale in his best _focus, Peter_ voice. 

“I’m focused,” I lied. “So magic can’t fix a mood swing, but it can cover it up, theoretically. Can it induce an altered state?”

“Depends on what you mean by altered,” Nightingale said with a twitch to his lips that made me instantly suspicious.

“I’m sorry sir, can you get _high on magic?_ ”

Nightingale shrugged. “There are a lot of complex spells out there, Peter.”

“You ever been stoned on your own spell, sir?”

“Goodness no,” I almost breathed a sigh of relief, when he continued, “You can’t cast it on yourself, it has to come from an outside source.”

I had gotten distracted again. “Ok, no, we’ll get back to that thought. Can magic make someone depressed?”

“No.”

“It can coerce someone to suicide, but it can’t make someone suicidal, right? Not in the proper sense, at least.”

Nightingale hummed in agreement.

“Can magic… wait, you said magic can induce an altered state. Is coming down from the altered state anything like withdrawal? Can coming _off_ a magical high cause adverse physical reactions in the body, like a drop in dopamine and serotonin, or whatever?”

“Something to look into,” said Nightingale, with a spark in his eye that said he was proud of me. “I’ll see if I can’t find you some reading material on the subject.”

* * *

It didn’t make sense for the book to stand out like it did. That should have been my first clue, but alas, such is life.

I’d been at the Folly for a while at this point, and gone through the mundane library once or twice, but it wasn’t like I’d seen every book in there. There were a lot of books stacked up on mahogany shelves and about a million index cards Nightingale wouldn’t let me digitise (by which I mean, wouldn’t let me foist it off onto Abigail to digitise). And that wasn’t counting the two other libraries. 

So, I really don’t know why I cared so much, what drew me in to _this book_ , except that it was left out for apparently no reason. It definitely wasn’t one of the ones Nightingale had recommended to me.

 _A Child’s History of the Raven King_ sat on one of the long oak tables that ran the length of the room. It was small, hard-bound in a faded yellow cloth, with battered corners and a picture on the front of a dozen birds under a crown. I picked it up and opened the book to the frontispiece, to see it was written by John Waterbury, Lord Portishead in 1807. In the corner, scrawled in the sort of spidery looping cursive I’d never been much good at deciphering, was written: 

_My dear Thomas,_

_I hope this book offers you another perspective, so that the forms and wisdoms do not bind your wings, love Bell_. 

Somewhere a bell was tolling, very far away. 

There wasn’t a date on the inscription. I turned the page to start reading.

The room grew a little darker, a little more lonely, as though the sky had gone grey with clouds, and a chill breeze swept through the brown, empty fields around me. 

On the third page, the quiet ticking precision that I know best as Nightingale’s _signare_ came into focus, the scent of pine and a creak like a rope against wood. I pictured a great black velvet coat, full of pockets, each of which held a different secret.

I dropped the book.

It lay on the floor and didn’t do anything interesting. 

I turned a little circle, to see if anything else had changed, but nothing had, so I turned back to the book. Books and paper, like wood, don’t hold _vestigia_ well. So, the magic must have been really strong, or really recent to have that kind of effect. 

I picked up the book again and focused properly. That time, I felt more distinctly the first whiff, the one that felt like an empty moor, bordered by thin black trees. That definitely wasn’t Nightingale. I looked about for any other signs of Nightingale or somebody reading kids books and casting strong magic in their spare time, but if there had been, Molly had tidied it up. It’s too bad when unearthly housekeepers get in the way of some good old fashioned snooping.

I rifled through the pages again, and began to read.

It was a story about a young King who came to England across the border from Faerie, and brought magic with him. He was the greatest magician in the world, and shared his knowledge and his wealth with his subjects, in exchange for the northern half of England, which had previously been under the rule of Henry I. 

It was written surprisingly factually, for what seemed like a fairy tale. It wasn’t the kind of dense writing or really theoretical scribblings that were as much a class barrier as the literal language barrier of most of the books, but a straightforward story for Ye Olde English kids. 

The Raven King and his fairy servants brought prosperity and protection to England, and ushered in the Golden Age of Magic. 

Then he vanished, and hadn’t been seen again, except as a shade or a ghost, or a story from an unreliable witness. There were also a lot, like _a lot_ of references to birds. He took his Raven title seriously. 

I looked back at the inscription at the front, once I’d finished the book, and was sitting in the increasing darkness of the library.

I didn’t know who Bell was, but _A Child’s History of the Raven King_ wasn’t exactly something I could picture Nightingale keeping past his sport-ball days at Casterbrook. Rugby and spells, he’d said, not fairytales and children’s books.

The Raven King was almost an Arthurian figure, from what I remembered, in that absent father kind of way. I figured he was about as real as King Arthur too, given that the book said he’d been king for about three hundred years.

Old Father Thames was about a thousand years old though, and my guv had celebrated his 114th birthday in January, so I was willing to be lenient about that. Molly had made one hundred and fourteen cupcakes to mark the occasion, which was really too many cupcakes for three people. I took the rest to Belgravia nick and won a lot of points that week.

Something about the traces of magic on the book reminded me of something. I didn’t know what, at that point, so I forgot about it. Just a little bit. 


	2. The Raven King and a revised history of Magic

We didn’t have any new leads on the Faceless Man, there’d been no sign of Lesley, and we had no other open cases, so my time was dedicated to Latin, magic practice, and Jasmine Jones, she of the ten-thousand yard stare. 

The books Nightingale had set aside for me to read were a lot more metaphysical than the usual research. And the usual research is Polidori and his very strong feelings about ghosts, so, that’s saying something. I thought I’d get to read about magical marijuana and the effects on the brain, but apparently no one had actually studied that. Dr Walid would have.

Instead I got a list of titles about enchantments.

Nightingale doesn’t use the word _enchantment_ very often. If pressed, I’d have said it was too goofy even for him, since it sounded a lot less like systematised magical practice under the Father of Modern Physics, and a lot more like Disney princesses. Enchantments are the realm of the demi-monde and, according to Nightingale, very little proper research had ever been done on the hows or the whys. 

Didn’t stop some of them from talking out of their asses about it. _Revelations of Thirty-Six Other Worlds_ , by Paris Ormskirk, was like reading a fever dream, full of weird instructions on how to counterspell illusions from fairies, devils, and jugglers. Once I’d finished a few chapters and read back over my notes, I decided it was mostly about _seducere_.

That would have been fucking helpful in Heredforshire. Could it make invisible unicorns visible? Or break Mama Thames-levels of glamour? I wrote down _A spell to dispel illusions and correct wrong ideas_ , and made a note to have Nightingale check my translation.

> _Place the moon at his eyes and her whiteness shall devour all the false sights the deceiver has placed there.  
>  Place a swarm of bees at his ears. Bees love truth and will destroy the deceiver's lies.  
>  Place salt in his mouth lest the deceiver attempt to delight him with the taste of honey or disgust him with the taste of ashes.  
>  Nail his hand with an iron nail so that he shall not raise it to do the deceiver's bidding.  
>  Place his heart in a secret place so that all his desires shall be his own and the deceiver shall find no hold there._
> 
> _Memorandum. The colour red may be found beneficial._

I made a mental note to test it on Beverley at some point. With permission.

Nightingale hadn’t given me a lot of reading after I came back from Fairy Land, so I figured there wasn’t a lot of research done on fairies. Apparently I just hadn’t been reading the right books. I’d asked Bev at the time, but she said she only knew legends, and listen, I like her _a lot_ , but she’s a shit storyteller and she knows it. 

Thomas Lanchester’s _Treatise concerning the Language of Birds_ was another weird one, about the relationship of birds and the multiverse, and full of spells to calm stormy waters and listen to rocks. He said that to perform magic was to be a bird on the wing, trusting in the void and taking a leap of faith. He _also_ said that the Raven King lived in a space and time where “the language of the wind and the rain and the trees can be understood.”

I realised as I was reading that the books on _enchantment_ were dated earlier than the 18th century, well before Newton had even published _Principia Artes Magicis_. 

This probably explained why they were batshit crazy.

* * *

I brought it up to Nightingale over dinner.

“Magic has always existed in England, as much as it has existed anywhere in the world,” said Nightingale in his lecture voice. “It has ebbed and flowed like the tide, but it has always been there. Newton systematised it, based on the lost practices of John Uskglass and the Aureate magicians, along with his cadre of Argentine scholars, but the theory of best practice was in constant debate for centuries beforehand.”

“John Uskglass?”

“The Raven King.”

“The Raven King was real?!” I did not manage to stifle my surprise. I might have shouted, in fact.

Nightingale frowned over his pseudo-curry. Molly was breaking out of her comfort zone again and experimenting with Anglicised variations of ethic foods. It was about as successful as any appropriated abomination, but it was more interesting than mashed potatoes, so I was willing to let it slide.

“Surely he’s come up in your readings before, Peter.”

“Nnnnno?”

“Not even Polidori? I thought Lord Byron had been deeply invested in Strange’s study of the Raven King’s magic.”

I thought about it. “Well, okay _maybe_. But he was a fairytale, wasn’t he? I’ve heard of him before, but that was like reading about Robin Hood or King Arthur or whatever. Just a myth, or,” I corrected, “Myth enough to warp the truth entirely, until you’ve got talking foxes and Carey Elwes in tights.”

Then I stopped and thought about that, because talking foxes weren’t actually as far fetched as Disney had made them seem.

Nightingale interrupted that thought process before it could quite arrive at _what if the Raven King was really a talking fox the whole time_ , for which I was grateful, and not at all put out. I did make a mental note about it though.

“Ghosts are real,” he said, with an irritating quirk of his lips. 

I was reminded, unwillingly, of the first time we actually talked, before Punch, before Lesley, before unicorns and Silent People and Rivers, when he told me I hadn’t even scratched the surface. I was a little offended. I’d have thought that three years on in my apprenticeship would have gotten me a little deeper than still scrabbling at the tip of the iceberg. 

“Yeah,” I said, dragging it out, “But…” I wasn’t sure where I was going with that. “King Arthur’s not real. Right?”

“History is written by the winners,” said Nightingale, “and that goes for wars, for conquering nations, petty crime, and the revised monarchy of the United Kingdom as relayed by government funded historians. It’s not so unusual that you wouldn’t have heard of John Uskglass as anything more than a myth: you thought magic wasn’t real. They didn’t even teach you _Latin_.” A punishable crime, clearly. “If I told you that Jonathan Strange had changed the tides of the first Napoleonic War by irreparably rearranging the topography of Spain, I’m sure you’d have heard nothing about it, because Spain was still in reconstruction, and Britain didn’t care.”

“You’re kidding.”

He nodded. “You can see it on the maps. There’s an entire town, I forget the name of it, that Strange dragged ten miles south, so that Lord Wellington’s forces didn’t have to walk as far.”

“How, is that _impello_ , how would you do that?”

“Actually it starts with _terra_ , modified by _motum_ , when adapted into Newtonian practice. _That_ is the magic of the Raven King. I knew you’d hate it, it drove David absolutely up the wall,” said Nightingale with a smirk.

“Can _you_ move a whole city?”

“Not in this day and age,” Nightingale sighed, a little forlornly.

“Why not?”

“Because in 1817, Jonathan Strange brought a Tower of Darkness into England, which consumed both himself and his master, Gilbert Norrell, the first and last English Magician of the Modern Age.”

With them went almost all the books of magic, stolen up and hoarded by Norrell throughout his life. The old books, from the writings of Thomas Godbless, a contemporary of the Raven King, to Jonathan Strange’s own book _The History and Practice of English Magic_. The only ones left were the ones Norrell didn’t care about, and therefore weren’t very useful, and the private collection of the Society of the Wise, which he did not know about.

“You said first and last English Wizard,” I started, but Nightingale interrupted me.

“ _Magician._ ”

“What’s the difference?”

“While we are all practitioners first and foremost, Isaac Newton founded the Society of the Wise, therefore _we_ are wizards, in the sense of ‘wise man,’ ‘philosopher,’ or ‘sage’. From the late Middle English, not the Harry Potter books. Magic faded from the world when the Raven King left. It’s part of why I was so sure magic wasn’t coming back after the war. By the time Isaac Newton died, to be a practical magician was to be a street-performer. All illusion and stage magic.” He sounded disdainful, which was not a usual sound from him. “Newton attempted to distance himself from the yellow-curtained charlatans, and denied being a magician long before Gilbert Norrell took up his title in 1807. This was one of the reasons the Society of the Wise survived Norrell’s persecution and disbandment of magical societies.”

He told me that for 10 years Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell were the Regency equivalent of rock stars, having helped Lord Wellington defeat Napoleon’s army in Spain, and then at Waterloo. They abruptly fell out of favour after the two magicians went completely mad and then vanished off the face of the Earth, startling the locals and embarrassing upper management. 

“With the books gone and the magicians nowhere to be seen, the Society of the Wise reentered the scene as the most prominent faction, and maintained that status for over a hundred years.”

Something that had been niggling me about that whole conversation abruptly came into focus. I squinted at Nightingale, who paused with his rice spilling off his fork and looked shifty.

“Yes, Peter?”

“You were a nerd about this, weren’t you? You can’t be bothered to remember anything you don’t care about, past the time when you have to teach me and Abigail. You _loved_ this stuff as a kid, didn’t you?” I think I was delighted. 

Nightingale signed and set his fork down calmly, like his ears weren’t turning bright red. “I thought it was very interesting.”

“You definitely tried to move a city.”

He snorted in affront. Then he said “I tried to move the duck pond in fifth form.”

“Did it work?”

“It was… a learning experience,” he said, and I laughed out loud despite myself.

* * *

Abigail was acting funny. Quiet, which meant trouble usually.

I didn’t see her as often as I might’ve considering we were co-apprentices. She mostly came over on weekends, and I actively went out of my way to avoid being at the Folly outside the standard workweek. If they needed me, I’d be at Beverley’s house, sleeping wrapped in her gorgeous naked body, and occasionally startled awake by her Russian ex-con acolyte.

I spent the weeknights at the Folly though, since it was the job, and also I didn’t like leaving Nightingale alone too often. Who knew what he’d get up to by himself.

Sometimes Abigail had half-days, or holidays that I couldn’t fathom the reason for, but she knew how to manipulate Nightingale into ignoring truancy laws and therefore it was out of my hands. Besides, if she was there I could copy her Latin.

She stopped in one afternoon on one of those mysterious gaps in formal education hours. 

I’d been in the tech cave, googling the Restoration of English Magic. 

There was, and I wasn’t ever going to tell Nightingale this, a lot more information out there than I had expected. Proper historical information, from actual historians, not just Arthurian-wanna-be armchair scholars faffing about. Jonathan Strange’s military career was bizarre and absolutely fascinating, and I could see why a teenage Nightingale would have been interested. Records were a mix of genuine sounding eye-witness accounts, historical documents, and yes, maps that showed before and after examples of the Spanish landscape, all wrapped up in the same kind of _did it really happen_ debate that surrounded Jasper Maskelyne and his grand-scale World War II illusions. He’d raised the dead, called down angels from the heavens, invented roads out of nothing, and turned a river all the way around, which I imagine hadn't impressed the _genius locii_.

The Spanish city Nightingale had mentioned was Pamplona, I found out, and they had been very displeased to be moved. 

Abigail clumped in and sat down heavily on the sofa, then groaned dramatically and slumped to the side so her face was in the cushions.

“Don’t you have class?”

“Half day,” was what I presumed she said, muffled. It didn’t exactly look like she could breathe.

“Have you ever heard of the Raven King?”

Abigail turned her face to the side, and eyed me. “Yeah, ‘course. Den likes to tell stories about him.”

Just me, then. That was fine. “Talking fox, Den?”

“What other Den would I mean?”

I shrugged. It was best not to actively admit defeat in front of Abigail, but she was surprisingly lenient with evasive maneuvering so long as it wasn’t about something she wanted. 

“You wanna come practice?” I asked, like I was offering a play date.

Abigail sighed. “Nah. I’m tired. I just wanna go home.”

She looked tired. She hadn’t been taking care of her skin or her hair, so she looked a little ashen and her eyes had deep dark circles under them. Still, Abigail turning down a chance to see magic was… concerning. 

“You feeling alright?” I was the Responsible One, I would be Responsible. For once.

“Everything aches. Feel like I been clubbin’ all night.”

I frowned. “You went clubbing on a Tuesday? It’s a school night, Nightingale’s gonna be pissed off.”

Abigail sighed, the enormous aggrieved sigh of a teenager around responsible adults. “No, Peter. I’m just tired.”

“Got a fever? Might be a flu.”

“No.”

I looked at the clock. It was early afternoon, and I had to get to the firing range at some point to do my own practice, but I offered anyway. “Want me to drive you home?”

Abigail shifted to look at me. Her dark brown eyes seemed very bright, lit up somehow, even though I could see the exhaustion in her face.

“No. Can I sleep here?” She was already vanishing down the back of the couch cushions.

“You wanna take a nap?”

She hummed, and closed her eyes. 

Well. That was as good a time as any to get started on my practice. I dropped a fuzzy blanket on her head and left her to it. 

Nightingale had me working on _semita_ which was less flash than _lux_ or _impello_ , but he said it would come in handy. It was something like an internal compass, a path finder, that could lead the caster in the right direction -- wherever that happened to be at the time. 

If done correctly it could lead a practitioner unerringly around obstacles, according to Nightingale. The traditional method of testing this was to put on a blindfold, spin in a circle until you’re dizzy, and cast the spell while visualising your intended goal. 

Mine tended to lead me more like a GPS aiming for the shortest route available, ignoring walls, tables, and occasionally my boss, silently judging me with his eyebrows in his hairline as I groped his chest and stepped on his handmade shoes.

Sometimes Nightingale tested me by taking whatever I was aiming for and wandering around the room with it, just in case I hadn’t banged into enough hard corners that day. I could feel when he did that though, the shift in the _forma_ that would lead me left, instead of straight ahead, which meant I was on the right track.

I was solo that afternoon though, and aiming for a sandbag at the far end of the firing range. (If left on my lonesome, I preferred to practice away from the lab tables, at least until I wasn’t walking into every stool in the room.)

I put on my blindfold and my shin-protectors (just in case), turned in a circle, and visualised. _Semita_ manifests like a fist just behind my bellybutton, tugging very gently at my insides. I felt it take hold, and pull.

The floor tipped under my Doc Martins. I must’ve spun too many times. It was like climbing a staircase where the rises were too shallow and the tread too deep, every foot landing in just the wrong place. Abigail must’ve been up and playing her music somewhere, because I could hear a flute like it was coming from the next room.

The sensation of reaching your destination was a lot more ticklish than seemed reasonable for the Learned Society but I didn’t bump into anything so, hey presto. I took off my blindfold and opened my eyes.

I was standing in an open archway made of rough stone, looking into a throne room. 

There was not, as far as I knew, a throne room in the basement of the Folly.

This room had a vaulted ceiling, and stone cut windows that if Nightingale had asked I’d’ve said were Gothic because I could get away with it, but he wouldn’t ask and also they weren’t _quite_ right. They had sparkling iridescent glass in them, refracting starshine into the room in wide swaths of rippling twilight. The rest of the room was illuminated by enormous silver chandeliers full to bursting with candles that smelled like beeswax. The stone floor was clean and even and laid out in an intricate parquet pattern that offered a path directly from the arch to the throne, where a tall black man sat, crowned with a silver diadem.

“Hi,” I said. I had decided not to be worried about a throne room in the basement of the Folly.

The black king bade me come closer. He held a silver orb in one hand and a sceptre in the other, both shining as brightly as the crown on his head. When I got close enough, I could see he was wearing an old fashioned black tailcoat and knee breeches, with pearly white stockings and black-mirrored shoes. He looked like a shadow lit up by his silver symbols of rank.

He was quiet while he looked at me, in my Doc Martens and jeans. I was wearing a t-shirt that said _PEW PEW vroosh beep boop vroosh_ in big Star Wars letters. This was the same feeling I’d had at the beginning of my apprenticeship, before me and Lesley had managed to convince Nightingale that dressing for breakfast was cruel and unusual.

“For two hundred years, my people have repented their wicked behaviour and indolent cruelty,” said the black king in the silver crown, “And I have ruled them in peace and prosperity.”

I nodded. It seemed legit.

“But not all of them have willingly cast off their bloodthirsty natures. All the doors to England have been closed, Starling, since the destruction of the masters of English Magic. Your master has his duties, now I give you yours.”

I thought it would be rude to interrupt.

“The doors shook again and you opened them, Starling, of your own volition. By doing so, you have let loose those who would take advantage. You chose and so you must reap the consequences. I task you now to find my lost subject, and return him to me before he brings to England a new plague of enchantment and misery. He has begun, and you have caught his trail. Find him, and bring him to face my judgement.”

The room had filled around us as he spoke, or maybe they’d always been there, between the light and the shadow. An entire host, dressed in the finest clothes, with strange eyes and strange features, men with fur on their faces and women whose hair crawled down their bodices like lizards, all wearing colours I didn’t know the names for. 

I said I would do my best.

Abigail didn’t come to dinner, so I figured she’d gone home by herself afterall. When Nightingale asked how my _semita_ practice went that day, I said “good,” and didn’t tell him I fell asleep in the firing range.


	3. Upon the moors, beneath the stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is set in 2014 in like a ~pseudo canon divergence~ where Lies Sleeping happens later so my stupid plot can fit in between, but i cant remember what 2014 was like so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> ALSO none of this is betaed, sorry, im just caught in a whirlwind of feelings and no sense and am writing by the seat of my pants

Abigail scared the shit out of me the next morning by simple fact of still being in the tech cave when I waltzed in, checking my phone and thinking about heading to Bev’s on Friday. I’d already eaten breakfast with Nightingale, Molly hovering and being surprisingly attentive to our needs. She’d even poured my coffee.

Nightingale had been looking a little peaky, so I guess it made sense that Molly was fussing.

I sat down at the computer to check my email, remembered I’d left a book in there, and spun round in the chair to see Abigail sitting up from her blanket nest on the sofa, scowling at me.

Reader, I aged ten years in that moment. 

Abigail yawned and stretched, rubbing her hand over her thin face. She’d slept in her hairbands, and I knew that something was wrong. Her puffy ponytails were unevenly skewed on her head and flattened all along one side. 

“You’ve been here this whole time?”

“I dunno, yeah?” Another yawn. “What time is it?”

I stared. “It’s 8 o’clock in the morning.” I checked my watch. “Quarter past.”

“Shit,” she said, bolting upright. “I gotta call my dad.” She was still wearing her trainers, even, had tucked up in a little ball and dropped off the face of the Earth for a solid eighteen hours. 

“C’mon, I’ll give you a ride on my way out.”

“I’m staying here.” Abigail was already swiping through her phone screen options and tapping like mad. 

“Don’t you have school? _Ever_?”

Abigail rolled her eyes. “I’m taking a sick day. Is Nightingale in?”

“Should be, unless we get a call out,” I said, and she nodded, satisfied.

I left her to her truancy, because I did, in fact, have a job to do. I didn’t know why, but heading back to talk to Jasmine Jones felt important that day. I wanted to see if I could pinpoint the _vestigium_ , and ask Pan if they knew any more details. I wasn’t much up on my enchantment reading, but I thought I had a better grasp of what to look for.

* * *

Jasmine Jones made no more sense the second time I spoke to her, but I was coming at it from a different perspective. This time she was really fixated on something called a love-begone-song, which was apparently played on the heartstrings of a widow. One such widow found that even though she had lost her husband years ago, when she played the song she drove off everyone else who had ever loved her, leaving her weeping and alone. She had learned the song from a strange young woman who lived beneath her willow tree. Once the widow was all alone and the willow-woman was the only one left who would speak to her, she left behind her empty home and empty heart and stepped between the branches of the willow and did not return.

I tried to let my mind drift as I listened to her story, but she wasn’t exactly making it easy. 

It seemed to me that Jasmine was very fragile, almost translucent like she was painted on a thin sheet of tracing paper and at any moment she might tear. I was hoping to find the same _vestigium_ I’d felt the last time, creeping moss, winter trees, and the sharp cry of birds.

The whole house had an air of oppressive sadness from the moment I walked in, the kind that caught in your chest and ached. I could see it in Pan’s helpless hovering, in the exhausted tones of Jasmine’s voice. I didn’t think it was _vestigia_ though. It was the sort of atmosphere that you might find in a long-term care situation, or after a years long trial without a conviction. It was the sense of lost hope, and an uncertain, seemingly endless future.

It took a minute for my brain to hit the right frequency, but when Jasmine started talking about the willow-woman I felt the drip-drip of cold water on stone, wearing away the surface for moss to cling.

I cornered Pan in the kitchen again to try and get more actual facts about this situation out of them. I made tea, did the whole routine, and sat them down with my notebook on a fresh page that didn’t have quite so many question marks on it.

“You said that it’s been getting worse lately, right?”

Pan nodded. They were looking more frazzled too. “Last few weeks.”

“Can you tell me when it started?”

They clutched the mug of tea, bright blue with _#1 ZAD_ on it, to their chest and shook their head. “I don’t know, a few months, maybe… maybe May? And then it got really bad a couple weeks ago. Must’ve been late June, since we had to cancel that account…” 

“It started affecting her work? As a boutique,” I hesitated, looking for my notes.

“Boutique fashion expert,” Pan saved me, “she works out of a shop in Mayfair, does buying and trends and advice. _What Not to Wear_ , y’know. And sometimes she takes accounts as a personal shopper.”

“So it affected her work?”

“It -- yeah, she gets confused, I guess, loses track of hours and where she’s supposed to be heading, and she sort of stopped caring after a while.” Pan sighed and ran a hand through their tufty red hair. It was looking very disheveled at that point, and I could tell they were wearing down. “She had a client who was, like, really big for her boutique, but she missed an important meeting. I remember her having talked about it, day of, she left on time for it and then…” they shrugged. “Then she lost her job, about a month ago. She doesn’t go out much anymore.”

I made a note for Dr Walid to see if hyperthaumaturgical degradation could manifest as dementia-like symptoms. She wasn’t a practitioner according to Pan, but there was definitely magic happening. It still might’ve been sequestration, which was right off. I did not want it to be ghosts in her brain, I’d had plenty of those and I was over it.

“How about when it started? What were the first signs you noticed?”

They frowned, and considered. “We were supposed to go out for our anniversary. It didn’t seem like much, she was working, and I had my stuff --” I never did figure out what _stuff_ Pan did, but ultimately it was irrelevant, “and she didn’t want to go. Said she was tired, that she’d walked for miles already. I figured it was work, and that was that. but after, well.” 

“And what was the date?” 25th of April, Pan told me, the perfect date. “What was she doing just before, do you know?”

Pan shook their head. “Not off the top of my head. Work stuff. I can find it, probably, but I’ll have to find her diary first.”

I told them to do that. “Is there anything else you can remember about that time?”

“Hmm. Do you remember, sometime last summer, when all the doors shook?”

I paused in my notes. “I’m sorry?”

“In August, all the doors to England shook. I felt something similar before, but it must’ve been… a month before our anniversary? So I don’t know if it’s related.”

“All the doors, from _where?_ ”

“From everywhere else.” Pan seemed nonplussed.

“Do you mean, like, Fairy Land?” Last August I’d taken my exciting adventure into Fairy Land and almost got trapped there forever. 

Pan rolled their eyes. “I mean, you can call it that. Aren’t you supposed to know this stuff, you’re the Isaac here.”

I pulled out my police voice to say, “This is all for the record,” which usually does the trick. Pan eyed me, newly suspicious of my basic competency, but subsided.

I asked if I could have a look around the place, and they said yes with the wide eyes of a civilian who’s trying to think what incriminating evidence of life might be out in the open for a wandering copper to find. (Turned out it was dildos in the bathroom. They’d been set out to dry but the silicon ones had a layer of dust, so sex was apparently not happening.)

Searching the house was weirdly disorienting. Every time I turned around, I expected to see something different, a staircase where a door should be, an archway instead of a wardrobe. I turned around often enough trying to chase the shadow of a long dark hallway, that I made myself dizzy.

As soon as I was alone upstairs, I felt the creeping _vestigium_ again. It was like being watched by an empty, grey sky. I resisted the urge to close the curtains, and focused on a thorough examination. The _vestigium_ didn’t seem to come _from_ anywhere in particular, it drifted in the air like perfume. I thought it might’ve been focused in the bedroom, but every time I tracked it, it slipped from me and I had to stand around clearing my mind to catch it again. 

I got a call before I was really satisfied I’d found the source, but I was beginning to think I wouldn’t find it anyway. Stephanopolous wanted me in to check out a body for _weird bollocks_.

“Send me her diary when you find it,” I told Pan as I left, and schlepped off to perform my best Toby the Magical Dog Sniffer impression.

* * *

Stephanopolous’ case was gross and _weird_ and gross, but as far as I could tell, nothing to do with us. Just your good old fashioned mundane bloody murder. I wished her the best of luck and waved cheerily to Sahra as I fucked off to my own nick, thankful to not spend any more time with the mess of body parts that had once been the victim.

I stopped off in the coach house to type up my notes. Even though this was not, as far as I could tell, a matter for the police, I felt like I was accomplishing something by following procedure. Lining up next steps as if they were actions, even if just for my own use, was steadying. I didn’t like this case, it gave me the chills for no apparent reason, and the systems of bureaucracy and paperwork offered the bare support of normalcy.

I had to ask Dr Walid about hyperthaumatergical degradation, I had to wait for Pan to get Jasmine’s work diary, I had to look up a love-begone-song and a willow-woman, I had to make sure Abigail wasn’t missing too much school, and I had to finish my Latin homework.

I wondered about the doors that Pan had mentioned.

I had to ask Nightingale about Fairy Land again. Maybe look at that book about fairy illusions again.

While considering my list of actions, I googled Jasmine Jones’ _boutique fashion expertise_ , and found her fashion Instagram.

The grid was laid out in one of those well thought out patterns that take _way too long_ to be worth the effort. I begrudgingly acknowledged that the methodology was effective though. Articles of clothing available at _Boutique de la Fortune_ , next to a street shot of Jasmine in her #OOTD, next to a motivational quote somehow pertaining to fashion and expensive clothes.

Her last proper post had been on 14th April, eleven days before the anniversary incident that Pan thought kicked the whole thing off. It was a photo of Jasmine in a trim, yellow woolen peacoat with a ruffled blouse emerging from the sash collar like a Regency neck-cloth. She had unreasonably wide structured pants on, shining black boots, and her long blonde hair up in 90’s style half-ponytails complete with tiny plastic butterfly clips. She looked vibrant and happy and comparing the then-and-now was a sad sight. The actual last post was one of the motivational quotes dated the 17th, but the description was filled with vague, meandering text that didn’t quite make it to _goodbye_ , but certainly invoked that sentiment in her followers.

I called Dr Walid and asked if he was available to meet.

“I’ve time this afternoon, but I’ve got a lecture at five,” he said. I texted Nightingale where I was going, not that he was going to look at his phone until the next time he had to make a call, and decided to walk over.

Dr Walid was setting up slides of tissue samples in his narrow broom cupboard office, presumably in preparation for his lecture. I asked him if he’d ever seen the effects of hyperthaumatergical degradation cause symptoms like dementia or Altzheimers in any patients. If the overuse of magic by a practitioner could fry your brain, the overuse of magic _on someone else_ could theoretically produce similar results. Not quite sequestration, but maybe something like it. I was thinking to maybe get Jasmine Jones in for a screaming brain scan.

“Do you mean memory loss and cognitive dysfunction?” he asked, not looking up from his slides.

“Sort of. More like,” I waved my very bitter vending machine coffee around, trying to think of concrete terms to describe Jasmine Jones’ case, “Losing time, wandering off, problems communicating, not verbally but conceptually, like making up stories? Depression, paranoia. More mood and behavior stuff, I guess”

Dr Walid looked up and frowned at me. “Are you talking about Thomas?”

“ _What?_ ”

“What?”

We stared at each other. Dr Walid frowned some more.

“Nightingale does that?”

“Did you mean someone else?”

“Course I meant someone else, Nightingale has _magical dementia?_ ”

“Who were you talking about, then?”

“I’ve got a case,” I said. I was, perhaps, panicking. A little bit.

I could see Walid realising he’d said too much, and attempt damage control. His eyes were way too wide to be telling the truth. “Well, he’s been known to make non-sequitur statements, but ah, who among us hasn’t? You certainly shouldn’t cast stones.”

“Ok first of all, that’s rude, second of all, I’m serious. What did you mean about Nightingale?”

Walid looked away. 

“I’m a copper and I’m bloody persistent. You know that,” I said, “I will annoy you into telling me if I have to, I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“He gets lost.” He tipped his head back, his voice resigned.

“Lost?”

“Yes, lost. Like the show. I’ve seen him wander off of at least three crime scenes in thirty years, so it’s not too often, but… He’s fine so long as he’s driving, but get out for a brief walk-about, and suddenly he’s wandered off talking about fiddles and birch trees.”

That didn’t make any sense at all.

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” I told him.

Walid sighed, spinning in his desk chair, settling in for a proper story time. “Ah, the first time I saw it was… He took me along on a case in the 90’s to Sheffield, might’ve been ‘96, ‘97? Drove the Jag the whole way up, then refused to get out of the car. I had to go into the morgue by myself and every time someone tried to question me, I sent ‘em out to see his lordship in state. Case took us out of the city a bit into Loxley, where he had to sniff around for _vestigia_. Perfectly nice country neighbourhood, nothing to worry about, I turned my back for a moment and lost track of him completely.”

“You didn’t just get distracted? Maybe he spotted something.”

“No, you don’t understand. He was _gone_ , down a path into the woods and vanished. Didn’t say anything, didn’t mention the case, just trotted off and away.” Walid turned back to his tissue samples while he spoke. “It took us three hours to find him.”

“What happened when you did?”

Walid shrugged, stacking his little glass slides into his sample case. “Nothing. He didn’t even notice how late it was. We turned him back around, and got back to the case. He didn’t talk about it at all, wouldn’t say why he’d left or where he thought he was going. Just said that he should’ve stayed in the bloody car.”

 _What the fuck._ “Anything else happen that day?”

Walid sat back, tugging at the ginger scruff on his chin. “Do y’know, one bit that stuck out, actually -- it was cold, February or something, but he’d been in the car all day, so he wasn’t wearing an overcoat when he wandered off. When we found him he was dazed, blue, and shivering. One of the constables searching with us gave him his coat, a great red puffer jacket, and he just snapped out of it. He said something about how it was a good thing it was red, or it might not have worked.” He raised his hands in a _make what you will of it_ gesture.

“Red… I think I’ve read something about that.” That was going to annoy me all day. _Memorandum. Quod color ruber sit utilis est inventus._ What was that from? “What else, what about the stories?”

“Well, the last time I saw him wander off like that was a few years ago, 2009 or something. We were up in Yorkshire on the moors, looking at Starecross Hall. He was _very irritable_ the whole time, genuinely angry to be up there for what turned out to be a bunch of hooligans messing about in historic sights. He can be a right grouch when he wants to be, the daft man.”

I had seen Nightingale annoyed by my distractibility, combat-focused in the middle of a fight, and fed up with Walid and I fussing over his invalid status after he’d been shot, but I had never seen him _grouchy_. Sometimes he whinged about the _Telegraph_ in a very reserved manner, but I figured it wasn’t quite the same as a four hour drive north with someone who did not want to be there.

Walid was still talking. “And again, I just take a moment to enjoy the heather, breathe in the fresh air, have a bit of a rest after wandering across the moors all morning, and Thomas is off across the fields without so much as a word.”

“But you found him, right?” As if my governor wasn’t safe as houses back in the Folly right that moment. I was feeling the urge to check and make sure. I thought about texting him again.

Walid had apparently followed Nightingale almost a mile across the moor along with the local Yorkshire PC who’d been sacrificed to the Falcon response team. They’d gone the whole way hollering at Nightingale’s back as he trudged through an increasing fog, not listening to their calls.

“He slipped into a rabbit hole and nearly broke his ankle, which was the only reason we managed to catch up. Then we had to carry him back the whole way.” He shook his head as though in disbelief. “Anyway, I asked him, outright on the way back -- this was the one and only time I got to drive the Jaguar by the way, so appreciate what you’ve got -- and he… he told me something very strange.” His voice, which had become nearly indignant at the memory of having to carry a reticent, grumpy, centenarian across miles of wilderness to no doubt much protesting and little thanks, went very quiet.

“Strange like how?” I asked, my voice dropping to match. I had dropped back out of panic and into a more steady interrogation mode, which I was thankful for.

“Honestly? It was the first time he really frightened me. I couldn’t wait to get him back into an MRI and check him over, I’d never heard him speak like that before.”

“Do you remember what he said?”

But Dr Walid shook his head. “Something about a bird who spoke to birch trees.”

“I’ve never seen him do anything like that,” I said, trying to wrap my head around it.

Walid shrugged, settling back into his usual demeanor. “Thomas doesn’t go north if he can help it, you may have noticed.” I hadn’t, actually. “It’s not that he doesn’t leave _London_ , he does alright, but as far as I can tell he has trouble with anything farther north than Birmingham.”

“Hang on,” I said, “What about that time he went to Aberdeen?”

Another shrug. “Did alright, I suppose, I wasn’t there, but he made it back.”

“Does that mean there’s geographical boundaries to this particular issue? Like, Northern England specifically?” I frowned into my coffee, thinking.

“Between the Tweed and the Trent, from the far side of Hell to the near side of the moon, three Kingdoms were given to him to be ruled and prosper, and so he made it be,” Dr Walid intoned, in a deep rumble. It sounded ritualistic and freaked me the fuck out, I’ll be honest.

“What?” This is where Nightingale would whip out his best _I beg your pardon?_

“The Raven King’s purview.” Walid waved his phone at me. “I just googled it.”

“Why would you google the Raven King?”

“Well, I googled Northern England borders, and the Raven King was the first result after Wikipedia.”

“ _Why_ am I the only one who didn’t know the Raven King was real?” That wasn’t the point.

“You learn something new every day,” Walid offered, with a surprisingly cheeky grin. I scowled at him but before he could be subject to my wrath, he checked the clock and started up. “I have to head out soon. Tell Thomas I want to see him if he’s up to his old tricks. And your case, if she’ll come in I’d like to see her too. See if I can’t get a comparative brain scan out of it.”

“Wait, is there anything else you know about Nightingale’s history? Like, when it started or anything?”

Walid made an _eeeh_ noise. “Not as much as you’d expect. I know he’s originally from Leeds.”

I spat coffee onto the floor. “He’s _not_.” Coffee dripped down my chin and Dr Walid smirked, triumphantly. 

“He let me take a look at his records about ten years after we met. Born 1900, to the landed gentry just outside Oakwood.”

“So he really is from Downton Abbey?” I’d been taking the piss. Sometimes Nightingale got that mischievous look on his face that made him look like a teenager, and thinking about that I could almost picture him growing up in a country home, surrounded by paneled walls and brocade furniture and bugle beads. The youngest of seven he’d mentioned once, which would have let him run wild in every off moment, minded more by the staff than by his parents probably. No wonder he was a secret lunatic. 

Walid nodded. “He is, despite his best efforts and about a hundred years of reconditioning, a Yorkshireman.”

“Seawoll would murder him if he knew.”

“I’m fairly certain that’s why he’s never said.”

* * *

Nightingale was in one of the ground floor sitting rooms with Abigail, which admittedly I hadn’t expected. If they’d been doing Latin, they’d have been in the reading room or the mundane library. If they’d been doing magic practice, they’d have been in the lab. There were a lot of empty rooms in the Folly in between. Eventually I had to ask Molly.

She led me there on silent feet (probably) with a surprising amount of reluctance, and stopped me from going in with an intense look on her face. 

“Is everything alright?” I asked and she shushed me violently, baring her teeth. Her black eyes darted toward the door. I saw she was wringing her hands, very subtly, over her apron.

I leaned in and pressed my ear against the oak panel. “I can’t hear anything,” I whispered with a shrug. 

Molly cocked her head, so I ducked down to put my ear at the keyhole. I thought about trying to spy through it like I was in a murder mystery, but I figured there was a limit to the cliche I would allow myself. I’d peek if I needed to. Molly crouched down with me like a terrifying, spider-limbed child, all balled up with her elbows on her knees. 

I heard Nightingale’s voice first, low and steady. “I’m sorry. This is not something I can aid in. A drowning man cannot save another in a different sea.” He sounded wry, almost self-deprecating.

“So we get someone on the shore to save us. Both.” Abigail sounded a lot more alert and fierce than she had the last couple times I’d seen her, which was a relief.

“Ideally. It’s not so easy as that, I think you’ve discovered.”

“It’s like foxes. You just gotta learn their language, right? You’ve had time to practice, right?”

There was a sound of shifting fabric, Nightingale resettling in his seat. “Long enough to lose hope.”

“How long?” Snappy fast, never satisfied, that was the Abigail I knew and feared.

“I was about your age.”

A break in her voice. “And no one?”

“Not yet.” Resigned.

“But maybe--”

Nightingale cut her off. “If anyone can. Speaking of, Peter,” he raised his voice, “you can come in anytime.”

I fell back on my bum and had to scramble to get back up while Molly sniggered at me behind her hand. 

Pushing open the door, I saw Nightingale in one of the leather armchairs by the window, with Abigail standing, her arms folded over her skinny chest, a worried frown on her face. She’d taken the time to clean up at least, moisturise and fix her hair. 

“Hey, boss,” I said, and tried not to let on that he was now a major aspect of my latest Falcon case.


	4. A red-and-white rose where his mouth ought to be

I woke up in the dark to the sound of a tree knocking at my window. The thin yellow light from the sodium lamps outside shone on the ceiling, casting strange shadows that moved in the wind. I’d left the window open a crack for the night breeze and the sheer curtain drifted, settling, like someone had run their fingers over it. 

I bolted upright. There are no trees outside my room. And there had _better_ be no ghosts inside it.

I conjured up a werelight, a perfect little globe of safety in the palm of my hand, and inched out of bed. I could have sent it away, floated it over to the window with _impello_ , but I really didn’t want to let go of it. It felt better in my grasp, and besides, I had to get out of bed to grab the cricket bat anyway.

When I looked out, the trees of Russell Square were thirty metres away across the street. Cars rolled past on Southampton Row, the traces of daily life echoing on into the witching hour, lights and horns and distant music.

I closed the window with a snap.

I could still hear the echoes of a branch scraping across glass, the rustle of leaves as they dragged against the mullions. I imagined great, dark roots digging deep under the pavement, squirming through nooks and crannies to break up the foundation of the Folly, to force their way inside. They were foiled to come in any other way, it seemed to me.

It gave me the creepy shivers, so I scuttled off to the tech cave to play Call of Duty until about 2am, and fell asleep again on the sofa.

Dinner the night before had been a trial of unimaginable proportions. Nightingale had watched me quietly, Abigail had pushed her food around her plate quietly, Molly had fussed and piled more potatoes on everyone’s plates, _quietly_ , and I ran my mouth about street style, social media, and the role of fashion in trans activism (as per Jasmine Jones’ Instagram) while Nightingale’s expression morphed from polite interest to pained bafflement, before I managed to shut my mouth and eat my beans. 

Breakfast was very much the same. I woke up with a crick in my neck and a hazy memory of more strange dreams, most of which involved being very small on a very high bridge that stretched across an empty landscape. Abigail was there too (apparently she was staying indefinitely) and she looked even more tired than she had the previous morning.

After Molly had reluctantly cleared Nightingale’s half-finished plate and come back with another pot of tea (she seemed to be working on the theory that if she couldn’t make him eat, she could give him a caffeine-induced heart attack), Nightingale spoke up.

“What’s happening with the Jones case?”

I sincerely wished this department was more than me, my guv, and my baby cousin who is absolutely not police and should probably never be allowed near that much civil power. Anyone else would be handy right then. Lesley May would’ve been a fucking godsend, if she hadn’t turned her back on everything I thought she believed in.

Just, like, a _little bit of separation_ between my senior officer who I had to report to, and my senior officer who I was going to have to investigate, maybe. 

I reminded myself that whatever was happening, it wasn’t a criminal investigation, and told him what I knew.

Nightingale sighed when he heard about the vertigo-inducing _vestigia_ , and the deterioration of Jasmine Jones’ mental state. 

“Have you received a copy of the diary, yet? Whatever the inciting incident was, perhaps it occurred outside the home, which is why you couldn’t trace the _vestigium_ to a specific source.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for, sir. It’s been a few months, though, I’m not sure I’ll be able to find anything when I do get it.”

“I have a feeling you’ll be able to suss out something, in the end,” said Nightingale, cryptically. “Look at Ormskirk again as well, and try to focus on the mirrors.” He winced, seemingly involuntary. “Focus on… the colour red.”

_Memorandum._

Abigail looked up sharply. I’d figured she’d’ve wandered off once we started in on the shop-talk, but she’d stayed at the table, messing about on her phone. 

I looked down at my coffee and notes and thought about what Dr Walid had told me. “Have you ever encountered something like this before, sir?”

Nightingale started to say something, but stopped himself with a little choking noise. He took a sip of tea and cleared his throat. He seemed to be reconsidering his phrasing. Abigail looked back down at her phone and started tapping at it furiously.

Nightingale’s phone went _ping_ in his pocket. He threw Abigail a withering look. 

“Sir?” 

He took a deep breath and turned his pale eyes to me. “There’s some… precedent.” He licked his lips and I saw rose petals on his tongue. “One spring in Newcastle, in the late seventeenth century, there was a glovemaker’s child who had wandered off unnoticed, and took herself up a hill to a street she had never seen before.” He stopped and shook his head. “No, that’s not it.”

His phone _pinged_ a few more times in quick succession, and both Nightingale and I turned to raise eyebrows at Abigail. She glared back and hissed “Talk like a fox,” to Nightingale, which was probably not as helpful as she’d been hoping given the look on his face.

Nightingale sipped his tea. “I’ve been told comparing myself to a person of colour,” he pronounced this very specifically, and I figured it was Abigail who’d done that particular lecture, “Is termed a _microaggression_ , but,” and here Nightingale smiled a little ruefully, indicating he was going to do it anyway, “When I was a child, my eyes were almost as dark as yours.”

I’m not sure what I was expecting him to say at that point. That wasn’t it, though.

Police interrogation training recommends a balance between refocusing your interviewee on the topic at hand, and letting them free-style to see whether they’ll cough up any details or related dates, names, etc. Despite my better instincts, I allowed the free-style and followed along.

Much like the much aggrieved Zoe Thomas, my eyes had changed colour after my brief sojourn to Fairy Land, from what Farrow & Ball would call Mahogany (No. 36) to the slightly less classically titled Deep Reddish Brown (No. W101), before Beverley Brook, avenging river and girlfriend extraordinaire had come bulldozing through the trees with an entire Roman road to save me. I had a working theory that the change in pigmentation of the iris was correlated inverse logarithmically to the time spent in Fairy Land, as evidenced by my melanin loss versus Zoe’s. I only had two points on a line, but one does what one can with the available information. 

Nightingale’s eyes on the other hand were what some would consider Wevet (No. 273) or possibly Blackened (No. 2011) if one were feeling bold (neither of which indicated in the title that they were essentially shades of white), rimmed by a thin line of blue-grey. They were so pale it was a wonder he wasn’t functionally blind in the sunlight, though I’d never seen him whip out any cool shades to go with his Jag at any point. Possibly because acknowledging the sun was an un-British pastime. 

I looked him over carefully, considering. Black eyes would have looked good on him, with his dark hair and his pale face, like a proper Sherlock Holmes. Or maybe such dark eyes would have made him look too much like Molly. I winced away from that thought, because I didn’t need nightmares about _both_ of them gliding around the place in the dark like Japanese ghosts. 

“I’d wondered about that painting,” I said. The painting of Nightingale had seemingly vanished since I took over the tech cave, along with the terrifying impressionist portrait of Molly in the nude, and a dozen other wizards long past, but I remembered it. Mostly I remembered _remembering_ it, once he’d let slip his exciting and unusual relationship with the traditional forward progression of time. 

Nightingale hummed. 

The painting had blue eyes, though. 

“But the painting had blue eyes,” I said. 

Nightingale put a little more emphasis into his hum, midway through another mouthful of tea, and moved his eyebrows about.

I thought about what Dr Walid had said, and asked outright. “How many times have you been to Fairy Land?”

He swallowed, carefully wiped his mouth, and said, “On the evening of the 21st of October in 1621, there was a young man in Peterborough called Ablestock, who was walking home after a night of drinking. He had made a number of foolish decisions that night, from flirting with the barmaid who was not interested, to challenging his neighbour to a duel, over the hand of said barmaid. Although he and his neighbour were sufficiently riled up, their friends managed to separate them. 

"Their friends convinced Ablestock and his neighbour to put off the duel until the morning, by proposing that the challenge could not be met while the sun would not see it. Ultimately, this would have put off the challenge for another five months, for it was an unconscionably grey and cloudy winter, and though the sun rose and fell above Peterborough, it did not see the land until the 25th of March, 1622. 

"However before Ablestock could risk his life for the sake of a barmaid who did not want him, he met a man in the woods where his house should have been. Ablestock asked the man why there was a wood where his house had been, and the man, who went by the name of John Brass, said he had misplaced his wood, and had come to Peterborough to find it. It seemed that the wood and the house had switched places for reasons unknown to both John Brass and Ablestock. 

"Therefore the only answer for how Ablestock could possibly go home that night, so he might rest and sleep and wake in time for his duel in the morning, was that he should go to where the house had gone. John Brass showed him the way, leading him on a long and winding journey through the rain, until they arrived at Ablestock’s small house, just as he had left it. Ablestock thanked John Brass, and went inside, where he has slept to this day, still waiting to wake up and defend his honor for the barmaid who did not like him.”

Black velvet and old smoke. Secrets tucked into one of a million pockets. An empty sky broken only by the lines of black branches like writing on the horizon, and a sensation like I might be able to read them if I could just _focus_.

I saw Abigail wince. 

Nightingale refilled his teacup from the pot Molly had brought out during his little speech and took a sip.

“What the fuck,” I said, “is going on, sir?”

He smiled a little sadly, and didn’t say anything.

* * *

Alright, so I’m no Lesley May but I _am_ a police officer, _with training_ and an eye for, maybe not the most relevant details, but at least interesting ones. I can, if pressed, put together a two and two to make four, if not an entire line of deductive reasoning. If this, then that, and such.

Nightingale had been to Fairy Land multiple times over the course of his unnaturally long life. He’d never mentioned it, not even after I barely managed to escape, and when asked told me a weird story instead of anything useful. 

Jasmine Jones, as far as anyone could tell me, had not left London in the last two years, being perfectly happy to avoid the country and all it’s unsightly features and up until recently been busy with her work in the explicitly London fashion scene. She _also_ told weird stories that made the skin crawl on the back of my neck.

Abigail… Abigail was up to something. 

I could feel my train of thought jumping its tracks, so I started again. Nightingale had been to Faerie, but didn’t like to talk about it. He didn’t talk about anything personal, though. He was always ready with a story about Casterbrook, or magic lessons, and of the billion questions that come up in my head, he was willing to listen and figure out the answer even if he didn’t know it off hand. 

But he wouldn’t talk about this. He wouldn’t talk about Ettersberg either -- no, he _would_ but he didn’t like to. He’d tell me exactly what I asked and no more. I did my part in that arrangement by biting my tongue as hard as I could. I’m gonna have to get a new notebook for my magic questions soon. If I didn’t think talking about David Mellenby hurt Nightingale, actually _talking_ about him, not just oblique references, I’d want to know everything about his studies. I could barely read his thesis on _genii locorum_ it was so dense and over my head, but I was determined to learn, and I quite liked the little shine in Nightingale’s face when I started in on a new thought experiment. It was my favorite _please put that down, you don’t know where it’s been_ mixed with _I can’t wait to see what you do next_ , and I relished in it.

No.

The magic was strong, it was insidious, and it was _uncomfortably close_ to my usual thought patterns. Every time I made any progress with the idea it slipped through my metaphorical fingers. 

Okay. 

Nightingale had been to Faerie. He didn’t want to talk about it. 

Talk like a fox?

 _Think around the point_.

He _did_ seem to talk about the Raven King a lot, recently, but that was mostly because I’d been asking questions. Because the Raven King kept coming up. I’d barely ever heard of him, and then he started popping up every time I turned around.

My mind stuck on a little yellow book. _Another perspective._

How old had Nightingale been when he first went to Faerie? He couldn’t tell me, so who would?

* * *

For the sake of being thorough, that weekend I asked Beverley what she knew about fairies and she shrugged. “At this point, you know what I know, babes. They ‘ent from this side of the river.”

It didn’t feel right being away from the Folly with everything going on, but Nightingale had raised an eyebrow at me when I said I was thinking about staying, so I packed up for Copse Hill. Molly had watched me leave with shining, dark eyes. Beverley made me make dinner while she finished her essay, before we settled in on the sofa to have a beer.

“Is that a metaphor?”

“Yes it’s a metaphor. They’re from the other side of the border, Peter.”

“The border to what?”

“To Faerie, duh.”

Pushing my luck, I asked her about the Raven King.

“If you think Thomas and the Isaacs are old fashioned, they got nothing on the Raven King,” said Beverley, leaning back on the sofa to put her feet in my lap. I patted her slender ankles and she glared at me, so I got to work. Payment due, I suppose. She sighed happily when my fingers dug into the ball of her foot. “Not as old as the Old Man, but almost. On the other hand, even though he’s like, proper ancient, ‘s a different magic, y’know? More earthy, hippy stuff.”

“The Raven King was a hippy?”

Beverley rolled her eyes. “He grew up in a Fairy court, what else would he be? ‘S trees and stones and sky magic. Animal magic.” She waved her hand in the air in a little circle. “Hippy stuff. Sometimes he messes about with rivers though, and we don’t like that.” 

“Wait, I thought he disappeared in the 1400's, is he _still doing magic?_ ” I squeezed too hard and she kicked me. 

“‘Course he’s still doing magic, he’s still king, innit? He doesn’t mess with Mum’s patch, at least, but Oxley said he mucked about with the Trent right at the beginning. And he nearly killed the Derwent, though Derwent broke the agreement first. Took away almost all his power.”

She stretched. She’d got extensions last time she had her hair done, and her box braids draped long and gleaming over her breasts to pool at her waist. She caught me looking and gave me a wink.

I dragged my eyes (and my mind) back up. “What did the Derwent do?” I was gonna have to look up the rivers of Northern England.

Bev shrugged. “Tried to kill him.”

Very pretty, _very bad at stories_.

I quizzed her long enough to learn that she really hadn’t been paying attention to Oxley’s stories, and if I wanted better I’d have to go to the source. She saw my frustration and drew me in close, letting me lay my head on her chest and listen to her heartbeat. 

“You’re really worried about him, huh?”

I sighed into her skin and buried my face in her breasts. 

“Peter,” she said, reproachfully.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m worried. He scared me.” Walid had been right, it was frightening to see Nightingale like that, helpless in a very different way than lying in hospital hooked up to machines that go _beep_. His pale eyes fixed on me, waiting for me to solve it, because he couldn’t and there was no one else. 

Beverley dug her fingers into my hair. It was still midsummer short, but she knows I hate that. I lifted my head up to glare at her, but she held me firm and close, and said “You’ll fix this. I know you will,” so I forgave her.

* * *

Ever since I’d met a hundred year old wizard working for the Metropolitan Police Service, I’d been dying to know more about his story. Unfortunately for me, I’d gone and made that particular wizard my boss, and digging for answers on a superior officer was kind of a no-go. Also, all his friends were dead, which made gossip more difficult, except for a few who were properly ancient and prone to drifting off in the middle of a conversation. 

Luckily, my job is to work around reticent victims, witnesses, and criminals, and figure out the whole thing with or without their help. I had a case, the mysteries around Nightingale were definitely involved, and I had an excuse to go digging.

So, the facts: I knew that Thomas Nightingale was originally from Oakwood, he was a hundred and fourteen years old, he had four brothers, two sisters, and an uncle called Stanley. 

That was going to have to be enough to get me there. 

There being my next stop: beloved of white people, Baby Boomers, and cold-case armchair detectives, Ancestry.com. 

I checked out a few other genealogy sites too, and spent three days digging through the rabbits warren of British double-barrelled inheritance traditions, before I found the Leeds branch of Nightingales (as opposed to the Atherton Nightingales, or the Derbyshire Nightingales of which Florence was the most famous). Uncle Stanley who had gone to Casterbrook turned out to be the least helpful of the lot, since he turned out to be Stanley Greysteel, and not a Nightingale at all, which was rude of him. 

_Born 1st January, 1900, Thomas Allen Nightingale, died ??????_

I wasn’t sure if Nightingale knew there was an entire crop of history-buffs debating his mortal status on MyHeritage since 2003.

I hesitated when I saw his name. Very suddenly it felt like an invasion of his closely held privacy, to be reading about the sisters he didn’t talk about. I offered up a moment of silence for the boundaries between a man and his guv, and dove on in. It wasn’t like I didn’t desperately want to know anyway.

His closest sibling Dafney had been born 1893, which meant that his siblings ranged from seven to seventeen years older than him. The first nephew, Edgar, was born 1907 when John Nightingale Junior, first son and heir, was twenty-four.

Thus followed an embarrassment of nieces, nephews, and niblings, enough to fill multiple English manor houses, just in time for the inevitable decline of the English manor house. By the 1930’s there were dozens of them. The various branches broke apart to resettle in smaller, slightly less impressive estates, leaving behind Junior and his inheritance to hold down the fort. 

Arabella Woolsley née Nightingale, born 18th August 1889, must have been the Bell who had given my Nightingale _A Child’s History of the Raven King_. Arabella had four children between 1912 and 1925, none of whom retained the Nightingale name, though she did have a Thomas of her own in the mix. (I counted four Thomas’ and twelve Johns in the two page spread.) Her children had children, despite all common sense, continuing the line and so on. 

And so it was that I picked out Diana Woolsley of Leeds, born 1958 and apparent spearhead of the _What the Fuck Happened to Thomas Nightingale_ search on FamilyTrace, as my most likely access point into the mystery that was my boss.

I sent her an email.

Then I went back into the Folly and practiced for a couple hours under Nightingale’s watchful eye, trying to pretend I hadn’t been snooping. I’m a copper, and he was part of my investigation. I wasn’t going to feel bad. I refused. 

We also weren’t talking about it, because some of us physically couldn’t, and some of us were too awkward to bring it up. 

Besides, I was just getting started. If I cracked after a week of googling, how was I going to cope after I read his sister’s diary? 

Diana Woolsley emailed me back and invited me for tea later that week, with a promise of her grandmother’s entire collection of journals in exchange for an update on The Mysterious Disappearance of Thomas Nightingale, Esquire. I didn’t know what I was going to tell her, but I wanted those journals, so I would do what I did best and figure it out as I went.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can nightingale have a conversation without tea? the world will never know
> 
> (alsoif you notice the multiple continuity errors, it's because i'm a fickle bitch who can't make up their mind, sorry)


	5. The spitting image of his father

I got an email from Pan with Jasmine Jones’ diary. It was awash with her daily tasks, colour coded in blocks, which amounted to an astonishing wall of items. I was overwhelmed just looking at it, I couldn’t imagine trying to actually complete all of them. 

I flicked through the days between the 14th and the 25th of April, trying to parse it, and focused specifically around the 17th, with the last weird Instagram post. 

Et voilà. 

On 16th April, Jasmine had a scheduled coffee with someone called Maria in Marylebone, a lunch consultation at _Boutique de la Fortune_ , and a personal shopper client meeting at the Leopard Bar and Cigar Lounge in the Montague on the Gardens, which is, in case you’re paying attention, just off Russell Square. 

She’d been on our turf, _literally in our back garden_ , one day before her creepy good-bye post, and nine days before the anniversary kick off.

I dragged Toby out for a walk ‘round the corner and onto Montague Street. He fussed when he saw we weren’t going across the street to the Square, pulling at the lead longingly, his beady little eyes on the black birds lining the trees. Eventually he consented to being dragged past the Montague for the sake of proper policing. Unless you ask DCI Seawoll, in which case it’s absolute bollocks.

The Montague was, like most of the other buildings on Russell Square, a set of Georgian townhouses full of English charm, designed by James Burton in 1803. Just off the side of the British Museum on a Wednesday morning, Montague Street was already picking up foot traffic.

I took my time, letting Toby have his run of the lead to sniff at the iron railings, the pedestrians, and the pots of red flowers all along the Montague. I could hear the chorus of Beverley and Nightingale both sighing in exasperation. What can I say? They were red. Good enough for me.

I plucked one, and tucked it into my jacket pocket.

Toby yapped his little doggy head off when we were three quarters of the way down the block and I knew we were there. They wouldn’t let me bring a noisy, excitable terrier inside, which seemed very reasonable to me, so I left Toby tied up outside with a stern word.

The _vestigium_ was right in the doorway, soaked into the stone facade, like crossing from a hot summer day into freezing A/C. Cold water down the back of my jacket, dizzying heights under my feet, birds calling, and the slow, crawling itch of moss on my skin.

Past the threshold it settled, and I gave myself a little shake, feeling like my skin was just a little too tight. I had a look round anyway. Look, I _know_ it’s in the name, but I really wasn’t expecting the sheer _leopardness_ of the Leopard Bar and Cigar Lounge. It was… a lot.

Carpet, wallpaper, chair backs, _drinks_. Not that it was early enough for drinks. I was going to be seeing spots for days.

Just like in Jasmine and Pan’s home, the _vestigium_ inside the Leopard Bar seemed to drift, but it didn’t have quite the grip on me as it had before. The red flower in my pocket kept catching my attention when I thought I caught sight of one of those dark corridors.

I followed the looping path past the sleeping leopard statue, around a table, lost it at the bar, and found it again back at the piano. 

I could see the staff working up the nerve to follow me, even though they could see me from one end of the bar to the other, so I stepped up close and pulled out my warrant card. Not just to see their faces, but you take what you can get.

I asked the bartender, a stocky white man in an off-the-rack black satin waistcoat and white button down, with dark hair and a sharp little goatee, if he knew who’d been working mid-afternoon on 16th April, and if Jasmine Jones had been in to have a drink with her meeting. 

The server of the day, Lily Hewett, mid-thirties, white, with plain round features, a small button nose, and shockingly bright red hair, remembered Jasmine clearly. “She used to come in every other week or so, always so dressed up. I liked her outfits, so stylish,” she said. 

“Was she here the 16th of April?” I asked.

Hewett shrugged. “I think so, I dunno. Is she in trouble?”

“She’s not in trouble. We’re just trying to establish her schedule that day. Is there any way you can find out?” I cast a glance at the computer with the till. Hewett followed my gaze.

“Oh, er, I suppose it might be in the records. I could look it up?” She asked, like she was hoping I wouldn’t want that.

I smiled, and said “That’d be great, thanks.” 

Hewlett scanned through the computer and started frowning. I waited patiently for her to offer up whatever it was she’d found.

“Well,” she started, and hesitated. “I don’t --” She looked around with a frown, scanning the back counter, covered in liquor bottles and stacks of clean, upside down tumblers. It was still early, so there wasn’t much mess. Her eyes caught on the short glass with last night's bank cards that hadn’t been picked up. 

“What’s the problem?” I asked, watching as she darted over to rifle through the handful of plastic.

“She never paid out her tab.” Hewlett handed one to me. “It’s been months.”

Jasmine Jones. Valid thru 9/17. 

I wrapped it in a paper napkin, having utterly failed to bring any forensic evidence equipment with me. “This was from the 16th?” She nodded. “And she hasn’t been back since?”

Hewlett shrugged again, but much more baffled that time.

“Apparently.”

I asked when the last time she saw Jasmine was, and she told me that she’d been wearing an oversized red jumper and shiny tights. It may or may not have been the 16th.

“Did you see her leave?”

Hewlett frowned, and thought about it. “She had a… she met someone. Had a meeting or something, she usually comes in for meetings, more fashion people, or whatever. And she met someone, and they had a drink, and then… Someone else.”

“Can you describe either of the other people?” I had a name from Jasmine’s diary, I just wanted confirmation.

“One was another regular, they met a few times, I think they worked together or something? Older lady, maybe 40 with ash blonde hair and big shoulder pads. Pencil skirt.”

I noted that down, whatever help it might be. 

“The other… I saw the older woman leave, I remember that.”

“Was that before or after Jasmine?”

“Before. Or… after?”

“One of the two, preferably,” I couldn’t help myself.

“After, then. Except…”

“Did you see Jasmine leave?”

“Mm. I must’ve. But I don’t -- er, she might’ve left with the other one.”

“And can you describe them?” 

Hewlett got a strange look in her eyes, dreamy, almost starstruck. “Y’know I think he might’ve been royalty. A foreign prince, or a king or something. Maybe Danish, you know how they are.”

I did not know how the Danish were. “What did he look like?” If she didn’t give me at least his shirt colour I was going to do something inadvisable.

“He was tall and handsome. Dressed very finely. And he had such lovely eyes. Like beetles.”

I stared at her. She blinked at me.

“Beetles?”

“Y’know, those shiny green ones.”

Right.

I tried a few more tactics to get _literally any_ details out of Hewlett, but she wasn’t having it, so I called it a day. I gave her my card, in case she remembered anything, and packed up Jasmine Jones’ bank card in my notebook, wrapped in its very poor forensic counter-napkin.

Heading back through the door, the _vestigium_ slid across me again like a cold, creepy shower.

I fetched Toby and walked slowly back to the Folly, thinking about it. Whatever happened to Jasmine Jones definitely happened on our manor, and that just wasn’t doing. And the man with the shining beetle eyes was concerning, especially since I didn’t have much to work with. I needed to talk to Nightingale, but frankly I had no idea what I was going to get out of him.

A raucous noise made me look up. There were… a lot of birds in Russell Square. Harsh cries echoing against the blue of the sky, filtered through the leaves, each individual call refracting into a million responses. 

Toby yapped like he could conceivably win against a single raven, let alone a couple hundred, before I dragged him back down to the kitchen entrance where he settled for a nap under Molly’s stove. 

I found Nightingale in the magical library, pouring over a stack of books, surrounded by the musty smell of old glue and cracked leather. The morning light came through the windows warm and yellow and hit the deep browns and reds of the library to make a surprisingly cozy little haven. Nightingale mostly came here when he needed to find stuff for me, or when he needed to refresh his memory on whatever spells came next in my lessons, don’t think I didn’t pick that up. I wondered what he was trying to find, and if he’d be able to tell me about it.

He looked up with raised eyebrows when I came in, knocking at the door jam to let him know I was there. We’d been dancing around each other since that breakfast. Didn’t know what to say, how to say it, or whether it would help at all. I leaned against the doorframe instead of coming all the way in.

“I think I found the scene of the crime,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. I kicked a heel up too, to make it seem casual. “Leopard Bar in the Montague.”

Nightingale’s dark brows drew down. “That’s just around the corner, isn’t it?”

“Got it in one, boss.” I told him what Hewlett had said, about the mystery client, and the even more mysterious mystery guest, and how Jasmine Jones had upped and left without anyone noticing her go, or the fact that she’d left her bank card for over two months. 

”That’s somewhat concerning,” Nightingale said. He frowned at his books and shuffled them about some.

“Can you tell me what you’re thinking?” I asked, not expecting much.

Nightingale shook his head, smiling wryly. He bit his lip, seemed to concentrate, and said “The crime scene being so close to the Folly doesn’t seem a coincidence to me. There may have been… a reason.”

“To be in the area? Well, yeah, Jasmine had regular client meetings at the Leopard Bar, of course she had a reason to be around here.”

He looked at me solemnly. “Peter.”

I swallowed. “Do you mean the mystery guest, the man with the shiny beetle eyes? You think _he_ had a reason to be nearby?”

Nightingale nodded. “Watch out for yourself outside the Folly. The protections don’t extend enough to shield you if you go too far. We’re none of us any good if you make yourself vulnerable.”

He took me downstairs to the lab to practice. Abigail was there again, middle of the day on a school day. I was close to giving up, but I wasn’t there yet so I heckled her while she practiced _scindere_ , and Nightingale walked me into the lab tables with impunity. 

He lectured while he did it, telling me about the history of path finding, and the possibility of using _semita_ in an open area, how far and how long you could hold it before it bore holes in your brain. 

“Did you use this at Ettersberg?” I asked.

Nightingale hesitated. Even though I had the blindfold on, I thought I could sense him looking side eyed at Abigail. 

“After, yes. There are various techniques to modify the _forma_ so that your target suits your needs, yes I thought you’d like that.” He was smirking. And probably shaking his head. “Targeting an object tends to carry you to the _closest_ one if you’re not paying attention, which is why you keep walking into Abigail’s apples.” 

I was pretty sure she was deliberately fixing them in place to be head height, but I wasn’t going to argue. They were _very well fixed_ and I had a bruise on my forehead to prove it.

Nightingale continued, “Targeting a location or a person is easier as they are uniquely individual, but they present their own problems: people move about, you see, and finding a path to a location depends on your mode of transport and how far you have to go. Eventually you’ll discover for yourself that the _forma_ is not designed to operate with lifts, but first you’ll have to find your way out of this room.”

Abigail snorted, and her apples wobbled. Nightingale gave one a _thwack_ and rocketed it across the lab in a spray of juice and apple bits. I may have squeaked. 

“Concentrate,” he said, casually, as though he hadn’t launched an apple past my head. 

I wanted to tell him about the one time I _had_ managed to find my way out the room and down the hall, before I remembered that I’d dreamed that time. There definitely wasn’t a throne room in the basement of the Folly. I had checked, just in case. 

“Then there’s the more conceptual targets: home, safety, freedom. Those take practice.”

I peeled the blindfold up and stared at him. He was idly swinging his cricket bat between his legs, hip cocked against one of the lab tables. Abigail was frowning at an apple that was listing drunkenly to one side, like it was rolling very slowly across a sticky surface, and pretending not to be paying attention to Nightingale’s lecture.

“ _Conceptual_ targets? That’s not even a real thing. What is _safety?_ to non-sentient magic?”

Nightingale shrugged. “It means to the spell what it means to you: a place to be safe. An abandoned farmhouse for the night, a Roman bridge to hide under, a copse of trees --” his voice cracked, and he coughed a little. He looked away.

Abigail and I looked away too. 

“I wouldn’t worry about it for now,” he said, “I don’t think you’re quite there yet.”

“Thanks, boss,” I said. I put my blindfold back on and concentrated.

* * *

I held my breath as I drove up the M1, crossing into Northern England over the Trent, like a superstitious kid passing by a graveyard. I didn’t feel any different on the other side.

Diana Woolsley was a petite white woman who barely cleared my shoulder when she answered the door of a brick townhouse in Greenside. I almost flashed my warrant card on instinct, but kept it to myself. She had curly black hair cut short and gone silver at the temples, where Nightingale had one or two strands of his own, but I couldn’t quite see the resemblance. At some point, Arabella Nightingale’s offspring had lost about a foot off the top. That and the Yorkshire accent was genuinely disturbing to imagine coming out in Nightingale’s posh, even tones.

We settled into the living room-dining room, with a set of mismatched Victorian inheritance furniture that looked to have been reupholstered sometime in the mid 90’s. It was a jumbled, squashy, comfortable room that spoke of a careless kind of wealth, with less a mind for appearances than precious keepsakes.

Diana offered me tea and ginger biscuits, and then she showed me her binders. 

She had it all archived online, of course, she reassured me, but she prefered to be able to lay it all out in front of her, see it all at once, that sort of thing. Her first binder held a folded stack of A4 pages taped together at the long end, that accordioned out to reveal the entire history of the Family Nightingale, printed in Times New Roman size 8 font. 

I had to lean in to be able to read it. It was incredibly detailed, with a little key on one side that showed what all the different lines were supposed to represent. I found my governor on the third page. 

The second binder was a copy of her grandmother’s journals. One side had original scanned pages, written in that thin, spidery cursive from _A Child’s History of the Raven King_ , with the text retyped and printed out on the opposite. I was appropriately grateful.

“Now, if you’re looking for the entries about Thomas, they’re marked with little tabs on the corner, see?” Diana showed me, indicating the post-it flags that poked out between the pages. They were shaped like bumblebees.

“How often did Arabella write about Thomas?”

“On and off really, you can see they come in bursts,” she said, flipping through the sections, “but I think he was her favourite from the way she described him. He worried her so, sometimes, I think it caught on. You can’t not love him once you’ve read the stories.” She sighed, a little wistfully. 

“Is that why you’re so invested in finding out what happened to him?”

Diana nodded. “It’s part of it. He was very important to my grandmother, and some of the things she wrote about sounded… well, he seemed like a fascinating man. I know he was a Captain in World War II, I found his service record, and he was an officer in the Foreign Service before that. He must have been the most widely-travelled of anyone in the family. My father always said he was the best uncle of the lot, used to do magic tricks and such.”

Diana’s father was Jeremy Woolsley, born 1915. He would have been around while Nightingale was finishing his apprenticeship and for his early years at the Folly, albeit very young. 

“Before the end of the war, he was sent to convalesce at St Thomas’ until the beginning of 1946, and then he vanished.” She gave a little shrug. “No more records of him after that. I found my father’s service record, my uncle’s, all the cousins who went and came back, or didn’t. He’s the only real mystery.”

“You said that’s part of it,” I said. “What’s the rest of it?”

Diana’s face took on a look of intense concentration, and very suddenly I saw the resemblance. It was really ruined by the accent though.

“There’s something of a conspiracy online about a soldier who went by the title _die Nachtigall_ in the Second World War. He had a price on his head even, 50,000 Reichsmark! Terror of the German ground troops.”

“Oh, a conspiracy?” _You don’t say!_ I felt the urge to shift.

But Diana subsided a little. “Well, among the World War II enthusiasts. It’s more of an intriguing little mystery, I suppose you could call it. but I think it’s fascinating. The stories some people tell about him! Could you imagine if that was _your_ great-uncle? Only I can’t prove for sure that Thomas Nightingale is the same as _die Nachtigall_ , not for certain. I’m hoping that if I find out what happened to him, I can prove those bastards wrong.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s wild.” I could feel my cover slipping. _I_ wanted to know the stories.

Diana had her great-uncle’s most irritating habits of getting back to the point though. “How did you come to hear about Thomas if you didn’t know about the World War II stories, then?”

Luckily I had, in fact, managed to come up with a cover story. 

“I have a friend who has been looking for his birth father. He’s not much for history though, or ah, the internet? So I agreed to do some digging for him.”

Diane’s face softened and I had her hook, line, and sinker. “And you think Thomas is his father?”

I made myself shrug. “I think it’s a possibility.”

I pulled out my mobile and opened up a photo of Nightingale. It was candid, because I had been snooping while pretending to read William Pantler’s _Three Perfectable States of Being_ , one of the books Nightingale had given to me about Jasmine Jones’ case. 

Nightingale was sitting in one of the cozy green armchairs in the reading room with his crossword, frowning vacantly into the middle distance. He had been wearing Friday casual, a cabled Aran jumper over a blue button-down, the sleeves rolled up above his forearms, soft grey slacks, and a pair of surprisingly rundown leather moccasin slippers, the soles scuffed into almost nonexistence. One knee folded over the other, leaning back into the cushions, with the sun coming in through the lace curtains behind him, he looked like a movie star in a Vogue portrait shoot, like Richard Armitage on a closed set.

Diana gasped. She actually put her hand on her chest and clutched her pearls. “He’s the spitting image of Thomas!”

I lost her to her binders before I could blink. She opened a third one and began flipping through the pages, scanning photographs as she went. These were also, she said, in the process of being digitised. I wondered if she wanted to come back with me to the Folly so she could digitise the library catalogue.

She pulled out two photos: one in warm, dreamy sepia tones, of several young men laughing on a bench. I recognised Nightingale’s grin at once: it always made him look about twenty years old, and here was my proof. She pointed him out to me anyway. The second was a proper portrait, Nightingale in his Captain’s uniform looking stoic and brave, and just a little bit older than the man I’d left at the Folly. His eyes were definitely darker, even in black and white.

“He must’ve been near seventy, when he was born. Or do you think it could be his grandson? He looks _just like him_.”

I told her I didn’t know, but this would be very exciting to tell my friend anyway. I said I’d pass the word along and give him her info, rather than sending her the photo, since I was already feeling guilty about sharing Nightingale’s image without him knowing, in exchange for the copy of Arabella’s journals. Diana said I could take my time with it, of course, don’t worry about it at all.

Before I left, I found myself lingering over the photo of Nightingale and the other men. I touched the corner, turning it slightly on the smooth, varnished surface of Diana’s coffee table. That was not a Nightingale I knew, laughing freely and surrounded by people. He seemed to shine.

“Do you know the others in this photo?”

“Mmm, it was taken in 1922, just after he moved to London. So, that’s David Mellenby, Rupert Dance, and Blaise Pascal.”

Someone’s hand was on Nightingale’s hip, I could tell that for sure, but I wasn’t certain whose it was. 

More mysteries for later.


	6. The magician's sister

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't believe i did this much research into roundhay park only to remember that it's fanfiction and i can do what i want

Eight hours of driving plus afternoon tea was way too much for me, so I spent the night in a kitschy little bed and breakfast, and resolved to make my way back to London the next day. Then, while I was in town, I figured… why not?

I called Nightingale and got the OK to be out until evening. Not that Nightingale knew where I was, but it’s still important to check in with your guv. It made me feel like I was asking my mum to spend the night at a friend’s house, but that’s just what happens when you live at your nick. Improper work/life balance. 

I took my binder full of history and set off to the east side of Leeds.

> _April, 1904_
> 
> _Grey morning turned to brilliant blue skies in afternoon. Hope for a good week of sun, but not too expectant, lest I be disappointed. Thomas has been catching frogs and bringing them inside. Dafney is **furious!** Edward pretends he is not amused, though I saw him show T the tadpoles in their jelly shells. I like to think that spring will stay, finally. _

I’d had plenty of experience with what Polidori called _potentia_ in Herefordshire, the power of the natural world in its untamed state. He was a Romantic, and a poet, and therefore deeply invested in the concept of _untouched wilderness_ like that was even a thing, but he had his points. 

> _May, 1905_
> 
> _Third day of bright sunshine. Cycled to the Upper Lake with Thomas on my handlebars, shrieking the whole way. We gained quite the looks going past the village! I brought a picnic and took him to the wild daffodil field. The sun burnt his nose quite badly, but he put together a bouquet for Mother, so she forgave me the sin of forgetting his hat._

A plaque informed me that Oakwood Hall was a Grade I listed site. It _also_ said that the lands were a gift from John Uskglass to his human servant Robert Lindley in 1166. The area was used as hunting grounds for the Raven King and his cohort through the 15th century, and ownership eventually transferred by succession and marriage to the magician Thomas Thorpe in 1843, who promptly sold it off in pieces. Charles Nightingale took the northern portion, flooded the remains of quarries and coal mines to create water features, and settled himself into the manor house. 

Nothing about the place was anything like untouched wilderness, but it carried with it a breath of strange whispers that made me wonder. 

It really said _magician_ on the plaque too.

> _September, 1907_
> 
> _I think Thomas does not like the new baby. He has become most ferocious and will not come when called in for supper. Father thought to punish the servants for letting him run loose with their children, but I have done my best to put him off the notion. It is not their fault that Father will not give T the time of day, nor that Lady Mary is a most demanding mistress in her new motherhood. John looks tired. I think I shall endeavour to spend more time with T, so that he will know we love him still. I worry, since Mother._

The original 1711 building had been demolished in 1851 and rebuilt in 1857, for the sake of downsizing to a “more comfortable and domestic scale.” The newly rebuilt structure favoured the [Italianate style, inspired by Queen Victoria's Osborne House](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodsworth_Hall#/media/File:Brodsworth_Hall.jpg), built of pale yellow limestone, and was as perfectly absurd a single-family home as ever I’d been in six-degrees of. Two storeys, nine bays across the facade, Roman-inspired pilasters and banisters along the cresting.

It had seventeen bedrooms on the first floor.

The fact that it survived the further waves of demolition through the 20th century was accredited to its use as an evacuee residence in World War II. The grounds were sold in 1925 and converted to a city park, and the manor transferred over to a trust ownership structure and opened to the public in the mid-80’s.

> _September, 1907_
> 
> _T has been gone all day and Daisy says he has not been in the kitchens, nor has Mr Falcone seen him in the gardens. Edward and I agreed to go to the village if he’s not back by dark._

I came _this close_ to paying £15.50 to wander around Nightingale’s childhood home, but I managed to talk myself out of it and I took a walk ‘round the gardens instead.

Victorian splendour, I was assured, could be found in the geometric shapes of topiary hedges and labyrinthian walking paths. They had _two lakes_ , a fossil trail, and a tropical bird garden.

> _September, 1907_
> 
> _They have found him! Oh they have **found him!** Mr Davis in the village says he saw Thomas come down the fairy road hand in hand with a man in a long black coat, but I have asked and no one could give me the man’s name. I would thank him, but I cannot so I will thank God instead. They **found him**._

Arabella Nightingale’s journal wasn’t just writing. [Every other page seemed like it had little ink sketches of animals or watercolours of plants.](https://live.staticflickr.com/5147/5561094678_570d33e3b5_b.jpg) Cowslips and wild daffodils, she labelled them, bright yellow splashes against green leaves, bluebell, ivy, and gorse. She had a dab hand with the botanical illustration, as far as I could tell, but wasn’t as confident with the local fauna. She drew a rabbit six times over the course of three pages, the marks shallow and unsteady, as though she was working out how best to use a line.

I spent almost as much time flipping through the images as I did reading the entries, though I still wasn’t sure quite what I was looking for.

> _October, 1907_
> 
> _Thomas has begun telling the strangest tales. I think he could become a writer if it suited Father, a poet or a novelist (though I know the notion is scandalous, sometimes I think I should like to become a novelist myself). He has been odd, since he ran away. Quieter. I do my best to be there for him, as Mother had, and I like to think he rewards me with his fantastical stories, since no one else has heard them. Perhaps I’ll write them down for him, so that he might remember them._

The sky seemed so large. It was a gorgeous day, once the sun burned off the morning clouds, bright and sparking through the leaves. Like a great, blue eye watching me. I’d settled on a bench in the terraced garden off the eastern walk, under a pergola draped in creeping ivy. 

This was so not my world. 

I couldn’t picture anybody living there, _growing up_ there, not even Nightingale who was, as far as I could tell, an absolute terror of a child. Both times I had run away from home, I’d got myself back on my own as well. Maybe that was a realistic survival instinct, maybe it was lack of ambition, but no one had noticed I’d gone or come to fetch me home before it was too late.

Hang on, did she say _fairy road?_

> _June, 1910_
> 
> _Sun, oh! how the sun shone down glorious today. I wore cowslips in my hair along with my veil, and I felt the radiance in my bones. I do wish Mother could have been here. Thomas cried enough for her to see me go, and I will hold that thought close to my heart when I leave Oakwood. I will miss him, my sweet boy. We will not be far, but it seems a thousand miles away at least, to hear Thomas speak. I like to think that William will be accomodating, if I ask him to let T stay with us some times._

Now, as a proper Londoner, I grew up not much seeing the point of anywhere outside of London. However, if I’d asked the locals in Kentish Town about fairy roads, I’d’ve got myself a good kicking, a bit of homophobic rhetoric, and maybe an introduction up close and personal with the asphalt. In Leeds, apparently, if you ask your nearest local about fairy roads, you’ll get directions.

Granted, my nearest local was a historical gardener working at a Grade I listed English country house, but the comparison was what it was.

> _August, 1911_
> 
> _Thomas leaves for Casterbrook this week! I am glad I have been at Oakwood all summer, so that I might send him off. His tutors have done their best, but good Lord I worry about that boy. John has lamented his language for years, says he has gone more rogue than ever since I’ve left, though I do not think he has done anything about it. T speaks as though he were raised by the cook! I think I quite like it, if I am to be honest, though I know it will give him trouble when he heads South. He will learn, Uncle Stanley says, and I will mourn that bright summer boy, running wild and unchecked, and welcome the man he is to become._

I took my binder and headed off down the path to the eastern arena, where the land sloped, brilliantly green grassed and uniformly mowed, down to Waterloo Lake the second of the two main water features of the park. It had been dug out and flooded by out of work soldiers just home from the Second Napoleonic War, and they named it accordingly. The air was hot, the sun on my back, the gravel paths crunching under my boots. I could hear people laughing in the way of parks, just out of eyesight and maybe a lot farther away than you’d think, children shrieking, and the sound of a fountain splashing in the middle of the water. The path took me on a jaunt down the side of the lake, but I turned off at the classical rotunda marked as Belasis’ Fountain. 

> _March, 1914_
> 
> _Liam and I are taking Teddy to see Thomas for his Easter holiday. I had offered to arrange his travel, even just for the two weeks, but Uncle Stanley says he’s needed at some fair in the South. It feels like ages since I’ve seen my Thomas, no matter that he was home for Christmas, since Teddy had that awful infection in his ear, and Liam and I hardly slept. Now I’ll see him soon enough. I hope he will show me again that little trick of his from last summer with the apples. I think Teddy would find it entrancing._

The old fountain was no longer running, but the structure was still there as a shaded place to sit while ambling, and while you were sitting, you could stare across the gravel path to the fairy road just opposite.

There was a sign marking it, clearly labeled. I’m not sure why I was surprised.

> _March, 1914_
> 
> _T has grown three inches in a month if he’s grown a day! My beautiful boy will be taller than I am soon enough. He no longer falls back on his Northern speech and I find I miss it dearly. He is as handsome as John, as brave as Hugh, as strong as Edward, and perhaps given enough schooling he will become as smart as Lawrence (but I will not say this, for it would insult them both to hear). Uncle Stanley is horribly proud and it brings me joy to see._

Two slender silver trees with dark, horizontal markings scored into the trunks rose on either side of the path, bending inwards to create an arch by twining their uppermost branches together. The smell of pollen and honey-wine came drifting on a warm breeze through the gap, carried in from another world. 

John Uskglass had made a bargain with England’s forests, the sign told me, and the birch trees said that they would make doors to other countries. I looked again. Birch, not beech. I was gonna get it eventually.

> _March, 1914_
> 
> _I had hoped to write about the fête, but I find it’s sweet flavour has gone rancid in my mouth._

The sign said that the fairy road had existed since the early 1200’s, but had been closed until 1817, when the roads to Faerie reopened. It had not seen activity since two teenagers had vanished down the road in the spring of 1945, but the City Council maintained the entrance and kept an eye on any traffic in or out. There was a little basket on the side of the signpost full of bright red funfair wristbands, heavy paper with little tabs of glue that stick to your arm hairs.

> _March, 1914_
> 
> _We still have not found him, though the sun set hours ago. We searched but no one’s seen him. Uncle is furious. He keeps speaking of a Father who should have been responsible, but I saw the parish priest and he didn’t seem to be in much of a position to be handling his flock. The way he’s going on about it… I am frightened. Liam bids me come to bed, but I will sit up with Teddy until the candle dies. If Thomas comes back, he should see the light._

I shook my head, for the benefit of no one but myself, and kicked the sign. I wasn’t going down that road. I’d been to Faerie once and I was not interested in going back, wristband or not.

> _April, 1914_
> 
> _The fair continues. It is foolish to resent them for their frivolity, but it is All Fool’s Day, and I will be the fool. I can’t stand this._

I sent Beverley a text and put a wristband on.

> _April, 1914_
> 
> _**He is home.** Now I am relieved of my fear, I will write what I remember of the fête._
> 
> _We cycled to Trewsbury Mead from Cirencester, where Liam and I stayed with Teddy and Uncle Stanley. Thomas had begun his duties before the sun rose. T led me by the hand through tall grasses as the morning sun touched each dewdrop like shining stars. He was one of several boys from Casterbrook, all tending to menial labour tasks, aiding in the booths and games. Uncle Stanley said they were elected among their classes, and Thomas certainly took pride in the work. Ms Isis showed me around when Thomas was busy, and I think I will write to her often, for I quite enjoyed her company._

****

She texted me back immediately even though I knew she was in the middle of lab, and said **don’t u fucking DARE**

**I can’t be rescuing yuo all the time peter, i stg**

**i’m telling thomas if you get urself kidnapped by another fairy queen**

Which was basically what I was hoping for.

> _The Casterbrook boys lost the tug-o-war against the local lads, but it seemed a tolerable loss, since Thomas took the foot race and the running jump, Mr Dance the shot put, and Mr Pascal pole-lept into a hedge and thereby won the favour of the crowd. Liam did well for himself as well, I will proudly add, and took second in the bicycle race against a bear of a man called Oxley._
> 
> _It smelled of sweet pears, candyfloss, and coal smoke, hot sugar and wet grass where the boggy Thames makes its first mark upon the landscape. I am glad that I can find the joy in it again._

I rolled up my sleeves and passed beneath the birch trees. The sweet smell of wine and honey and pollen filled my lungs. The shadows turned themselves around to face the other way and the light grew warm and sticky with champagne chuckles. Hedges of dark green leaves and little yellow flowers thrummed as though they sang. I thought they might’ve been gorse, from Arabella’s illustrations, except all the flowers were actually very tiny hands, holding each other, and waving gently.

I touched the ivy that crawled up the trees as I passed, and saw the red wristband. _Memorandum._

> _Then I saw Thomas go ‘round the trees with one of the fair haired travellers lads to have a smoke. When I saw the boy again an hour later, Thomas was nowhere to be seen. I will not write of my fear, it no longer has a place here._

It was the same sense as Pokehouse Wood, an echo of something ancient just behind the floating wisps of pollen and petals on the breeze. The ghost of an orchard in the moonlight. I felt Polidari’s _potentia_ , the country version of _vestigia_ , as laughter against my skin, whispers just behind my ear, a dislocation of my center of balance like I’d had just one pint too many and I could feel the buzz in my cheeks. 

> _The old man of the fair found him, ‘though he would not say where. T was still wearing his muddied boots, and river-soaked trousers from three days ago, and he walked hand-in-hand with the old man speaking together in a strange lilting tongue._

I tipped into Faerie and came up short when I saw the castle. It was old, very old, maybe 12th century gothic and not well kept, with crumbling blue stones and ivy crawling up from the trees around the foundations. The path led straight to a portcullis and on either side were statues of birds as tall as I was, roughly carved out of gleaming black stone, each one almost identical in their posing but obviously handmade and individually carved. 

> _April, 1914_
> 
> _His eyes shine so brilliantly, as though they are made of amber. They no longer remind me of Mother._
> 
> _I have not let him out of my sight since the fair, but soon we will return North and I must let him go again._

There were birds in the trees too, but I couldn’t see if they were stone or not. Or if that wouldn’t matter, in the end.

I thought for a moment I saw someone there, in one of the castle windows, high up and peering down at me: a little white face like a moon in the darkness of the room beyond. A child, with dark hair and wide dark eyes, staring like a ghost. 

But he was only an echo too, painted on the glass like a [Georges Schwizgebel film](https://www.animationmagazine.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/romance.jpg).

> _July, 1914_
> 
> _T has been pacing like a tiger in a cage all summer, looking over his shoulder as though someone is watching. I hope it was not a mistake to invite him up, for I have indulged my need to be close to him and I am not sure if it has done him any good. I would not smother his spark if I could help it._
> 
> _I think he is frustrated with school. He says the masters of Ambrose House do not understand the truth of magic, that magic should be free and wild as cowslips on a meadow, or brambles in a wood, as true as breathing. I do not understand, but I can see how he chafes. I will do my best to remind him that the world does not end with schooling, but I fear my instinctive response is too childish for a young man._

No one was there. No one had been there for years, I could feel it in the too-distant whispers that asked me to go inside and stay forever. Pity-me needed a king, and didn’t I want to be _royalty?_

> _My dear Thomas,  
>  I hope this book offers you another perspective, so that the forms and wisdoms do not bind your wings,  
>  love Bell_

I saw the boy vanish like mist and I heard footsteps, steady and even and far too heavy for a child, on the ivy behind me.

> _Dear Bell,_
> 
> _I hear Ed is off to France, and Mr Falcone’s son Alfred. Tell Ed I will think of him. He doesn’t write letters at all, which is his loss. The masters say there is an agreement that the Society will not involve themselves, and some of the upper six are fit to riot if they can’t join the Army as soon as they leave Ambrose House._
> 
> _Thank you for the book. I am to tell you I was demerited for swearing by Bird and Book before you hear it from John. The masters think the Raven King is a foolish notion, and that I should focus on my studies. I cannot see how they are different, Bell, but every time I insist I’m written off as a yokel. I will do my best regardless, and make you proud. ~~John can stuff it.~~_
> 
> _Let me know if Ed writes you._
> 
> _All my love,  
>  Thomas  
>  _

He took my hand and led me down the ivy path. He had a writer’s hands, I noticed, smooth and soft, with callouses in unexpected places, and he wore a long black velvet coat. He was a practitioner, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t think of where I’d seen him before. He definitely wasn’t one of the Little Crocodiles.

There was a spotty white teenager waiting for me at the entrance to the fairy road, loudly chewing gum and staring. 

“What?” I said.

He popped his gum onto his chin and had to scramble to scrape it off. 

I got the hell out of dodge before he recovered his wits, and was gone down the path and on my way back to London, binder in hand, and a strange sense of having missed something really important.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there;s like, a lot of stuff going on in here, so: arabella's journal is based on Edith Holden's _The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady_ , the house is based on Brodsworth Hall, the park is Roundhay Park in Leeds (but ~magic~), and Georges Schwizgebel is a Swiss animator who does cool stuff 
> 
> ok ilu all who're reading this, tak for being here and enduring all my edwardian oc's

**Author's Note:**

> hey, hi, RoL is a new fandom for me, and i'm like, very nervous?! and deeply invested in this weird crossover which is mostly history and exposition, but can't stop won't stop
> 
> thank u for read, i appreciate you


End file.
